


Something That You Can Tame

by Cloverwild



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Azula (Avatar) Redemption, F/M, Gen, Rated T for non-graphic methods of self-harm, Romantic relationships are not central to the plot, specifically skin picking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:54:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28361250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cloverwild/pseuds/Cloverwild
Summary: Zuko was pacing between Azula and a line of his allies, his friends, and all of them knew how harshly her empty hands could burn.
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), Azula & Zuko (Avatar), Mai/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 39





	Something That You Can Tame

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed. I'm throwing the comics and LoK canon out the window. 
> 
> Set ~10 years after the end of the war, Izumi is 2. 
> 
> Title from Monsters by Mree.

She'd gone to see him, just once. Long after her brother had stopped but not so long that he didn't understand why she asked if she could. Zuko stood in the hall in his semi-formal robes and polished crown balanced in a pristine topknot. It raised his head a little higher, pulled his spine a little straighter when he knew he looked the part. 

The door creaked heavily and Ozai lifted his face, already set into a sneer like it had been frozen there. She'd wondered if her armor would have bolstered her the same way it did Zuko. But standing in front of him with a grudging obeisance clawing at her back she knew she would have drowned in it. Azula fought the longing, then the shame, then the *fear* as he spoke. His tongue was the only weapon he had to hand, the only thing he ever left to her like an heirloom sword to hang on the wall and Azula longed to use it; imagined the power of a smirk and words made to cut; imagined them clashing together mid air like swords, like twin fires, like red and blue and *pain*.

In the end she said nothing, clasped her hands to her wrists beneath her sleeves, nails digging into skin. His hands were bound, impotent and harmless behind him, and she wondered cruelly if they forced him to eat like an animal. Ozai was still spitting as she glanced toward the unmoved guards, three for the disgraced lord and one for his disgraced daughter. 

Zuko hadn't bothered with deception; they were less for her safety and more for Mai's peace of mind. A compromise after arguments over her presence in the palace at all, settled in Mai's favor when they'd announced the imminent heir. It had begun with three, just before the birth of her niece; then two, when Azula had stopped spitting sparks; then one when the only bending she'd done for months was to warm her tea during a too-long visit with Zuko. It felt like triumph or trust, as if Azula had earned either of them from anyone. 

Ozai ran out of breath or maybe out of interest, his rage the only fire left in him. Azula gave him nothing to fuel it. She tried to see a man to be feared, but he only looked tired, leaning heavily against the cold stone wall. His arms shook. Azula thought again of his empty, impossibly bloodied hands and tried to remember if they'd ever been gentle. 

She wondered if Mai would allow her to hold Izumi if her hands were emptied too. 

\--------

The Avatar was less and more than she'd always expected. 

He didn't know if he could give it back, he said. Maybe she should talk to her brother, or Iroh, or the Masters first. The idea of being eaten alive just to get some rest enticed her, just a little. She doesn't reply, his letter folded and pressed beneath a jewelry box (her mother's, Zuko said, but she's never opened it). Her brother got to be good and loved and protected rather than guarded without losing himself. Zuko said she was wrong, that he *had* been lost, that she was loved and good. 

She almost believed him. 

\--------

The tiny princess had learned to run. Her attendants were often out of breath or abandoned entirely, far more than Zuko admitted to Mai, and there was very little of the palace left untouched by small hands. Azula had seen Izumi, of course. Her brother held few secrets from Mai, but that he very occasionally took tea with Azula and a napping child against his chest must be one of them. 

But the dreaming face was nothing compared to the grin behind dirty hands, piles of bright weeds and abused blooms piled into her lap with a giggle. Her singular guard stood tensely behind them but made no move to distance the princess from her aunt. Azula arranged each new gift into a bundle, dusting the silk across her lap and shaking loose dirt from the bouquet into the grass. Izumi had to use two hands to take it from her, turning to settle her chubby body into Azula's lap. 

Izumi chattered, turning to wave flowers and weeds in her aunt's face, Azula obligingly sniffing at them. She was warm and perfect, unafraid despite how fragile her tiny hands looked trying to keep a grip on the stems. A leaf caught in a short strand of hair, and Azula cautiously raised her hand from where they'd been safely clenched against the grass behind her to pluck it out. She knew Mai worried, watched her hands no matter their distance or company. If she weren't so tired from baring her mind to the healer's satisfaction Azula might even be angry about it. 

When the princess was torn from her lap so quickly the toddler began to cry and the flowers scattered, all she felt was lost. Mai clutched her tighter until she was squirming, as if Azula might claw her daughter back at any moment. Long nails dug into the dirt instead, until Mai turned without a word. 

That evening Azula finally responded to the Avatar's letter, ignoring the restless shuffling of her four posted guards. 

\--------

It shouldn't have been a surprise. At the very least her request required the Avatar to be present, and he came with a set more often than not. Azula hadn't been allowed the luxury of secrets for long enough that it didn't really feel like a betrayal anymore to have them shared. 

Zuko was beside himself, pacing between Azula and a line of his allies, his friends, and all of them knew how harshly her empty hands could burn. Azula sat primly in the window ledge of the study, smoothing a round cushion repeatedly, the Healer Qiu's chiding tone keeping her from picking at raw skin instead. The Avatar and his wife, with a barely rounded stomach, sat across from her. His face was drawn, alternating between talking Zuko down and offering his wife reassuring smiles; her hands, one on a handcrafted waterskin and the other over her stomach, never truly relaxed. 

"I want to hold my niece." 

Zuko stops and the room falls silent. Azula focuses on brushing tangles out of the corded tassel of the cushion. Zuko was stuttering, his expression equal parts broken and pleading, to explain that this wasn't the answer. 

"Your fire isn't what scares her, Azula."

She does look up at the familiar voice, tucked behind the Avatar. One of the Kyoshi Warriors who had come in when Zuko's voice started rising and simply hadn't left. At Azula's gaze the Warrior tenses and pulls harder on her long braid as if to shield herself with it. 

Ah. Azula returns her eyes to the cushion, but her thumbnail catches a calloused fingertip. The healer isn't echoing loud enough to stop her this time. The silence returns, offering no solutions.

\--------

Azula takes dinner in her room, and although he should be entertaining his friends Zuko joins her. He begs for his own understanding, to know why she would choose this. He asks for hers too, offering that if Azula could simply spend years at a distance it might be possible, when Izumi feels less breakable in Mai's arms, when her niece is no longer small enough to really hold. Her fire is who she is, he says. What is a bender without their element?

Azula nods and finishes her dinner mechanically. Zuko sighs and twitches a smile before finishing his own. 

\--------

Katara stared wide-eyed through the crack in the doors, glancing briefly at the guards behind the former princess before waving them in with obvious reluctance. The Avatar rose from the low table, a brush left in the well and a troubled smile on his face. 

"Will you take it?" His lips thinned and she felt a thin panic, "Please," rushing out of her before she could scoff at her own groveling. 

Zuko's friendship was on the line. She understands, she said. Azula promised to handle the fallout, to assuage her brother if Aang would offer this final, undeserved favor. Katara offered only a silent threat, a hand running over the intricate stitching of the waterskin. 

He warned her of the physical weakness that may come with it, but she'd already seen her father. He requested a private outdoor courtyard, uncertain of what effects it may have in a populated area of the palace. Before they leave, Azula wrote a letter for Zuko - a precaution and fulfillment of her promise to the Avatar, in case she fell unconscious before she can explain. She asked a guard to deliver it after a short delay, leaving them time to begin before her brother can stop it. 

Katara pulled Aang aside to question him only once. Whatever his response, she nodded and stepped away, her eyes following Azula until the doors closed between them. 

\--------

She wakes later, in her own bed with the sunset painted across the outside of the closed curtains surrounding it. Zuko's voice is grating against her already pounding head. Azula looks down at her hands, pale and whole, with shock. All of her edges are frayed and tender, blistering heat pouring from every inch of perfectly untouched skin.

Well. Her thumbnail weakly pulls at the only raw bit of her, picking at the nail bed until some piece of her matches how she ought to look, how she feels. 

Zuko is close, maybe in her sitting room, but he sounds far too loud. Azula struggles first to sit up, resting against the headboard before trying to pull the light blanket off her legs. Her arms can't lift it, and she settles instead for sliding her legs up and slowly pushing it toward the end of the bed. The Avatar's warning hadn't done this justice. 

The curtains are wrenched back to reveal Healer Qiu, displeasure outlined in thinned lips and hard eyes. She urges Azula back under the cover, her touch gentle but too strong to resist for the moment. The healer mutters to herself, some words lost to the piercing ache centered at the crown of Azula's head, some interrupted by the shouts of an angry Fire Lord in the next room. Azula thinks unkindly that he's never sounded more like father, then remembers which of them is weak and empty-handed. 

She feels feverish, burning up and shaking cold all at once. When she asks Qiu, voice raw, the healer says her body has never had to do this on its own. Her temperature will have to be monitored closely until her body learns to regulate externally. That her inner fire had made her weak to something as mundane as weather. Qiu straightens the blanket over the edge of the bed, heaves a final sigh, and leaves through the door of the sitting room. 

It's open again before the latch clicks, her brother disheveled and wild-eyed. He settles at her side, head already shaking, mouth opening to ask more questions than she wants to answer --.

"Zuzu, who am I without my bending?" Zuko looked sick at his words being thrown back at him. "I think one of us should know, shouldn't we?"

**Author's Note:**

> I welcome critique of my writing style, please be constructive if you do so.


End file.
